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Kim Westheimer is a diversity consultant, educator, and writer. She conducts workshops and designs written materials related to organizational diversity and strategic planning. Kim is the coauthor of *When the Drama Club is Not Enough: Lessons from the Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students*. Her work has also been published by Phi Delta Kappan, The American Psychological Association, and the Center for the Study of Social Policy. She formerly directed The Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students at the Massachusetts Department of Education. Organizations which have hired Kim to address their membership include the California Association of School Health Educators, The National Institute for Teaching excellence, The Centers for Disease Control Division of Adolescent School Health, congregation Agudat Achim, Casey Family Services, and Harvard University's Askwith forum. Kim received her master's degree in Urban Policy from Tufts University and her bachelor's degree from Cornel University. She has taught undergraduates at Harvard University and graduate students at Framingham State University. She has received numerous awards including a Health and Human Services research grant; a Harvard University Certificate of distinction in Teaching; and an honor award for service from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.

Joseph Tovares is the Executive Producer of La Plaza, the Latino production unit at WGBH/Boston. Tovares has editorial supervision over all La Plaza productions local, national, specials and interactive including the nationally distributed series, Maria Hinojosa: One-On-One. Prior to his work at La Plaza, Tovares was the Series Editor at *American Experience*. Mr. Tovares is the producer of *Zoot Suit Riots*, a one-hour film for American Experience about Mexican American youth in 1942 Los Angeles who dared to challenged the unwritten social codes of wartime LA and paid a heavy price. Mr. Tovares is also the producer of *Remember the Alamo*, a film about the Mexican community in Texas in the years leading up to the battle of the Alamo and the war for Texas independence. A native of San Antonio, Texas, Tovares is a graduate of the School of Public Communication at Boston University and holds a master's degree in Radio-Television-Film from the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

**Samantha Power** is an Irish-American academic, author and diplomat who served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power began her career by covering the Yugoslav Wars as a journalist. From 1998 to 2002, she served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she later became the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster."

Mary Casey is a folk musician and recording artist who has been singing and playing Celtic and folk music for over 20 years, performing in coffee houses, folk festivals, and benefit concerts in North Carolina and across New England. She has recorded extensively with singer-songwriter Carolyn McDade, and most recently performed with Gail Rundlett and Dimitri Eleftherakis at folk venues and festivals in the Boston area.

Sidney Mintz is the William L. Straus Jr. Professor Emeritus and a research professor of anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and the author of Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom.

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for 13 years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002. Since 2004 he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Historical Society and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate both the Lincoln anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition.

Julie Saville's research and teaching are focused on plantation societies of the southern United States and regions of the Caribbean from the 18th through the 20th centuries. She is especially interested in how broad historical changes during the era of trans-Atlantic slave emancipations are related to daily life, the social relations of labor, and popular forms of political expression.

Within the general field of Early American history, John Wood Sweet's research focuses on the dynamics of colonialism and on the interplay of religious cultures. In *Bodies Politic* he explores the encounters of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in New England and argues that the racial legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the American North as well as the South. Sweet has also worked with other historians and literary scholars on the Jamestown colony and its broader cultural and international contexts. Now, he is beginning a new project on dreams, visions, apparitions, trances, and other out-of-body experiences-and how various groups of early Americans interpreted them.

From 1993 to 1999, Dean Speth served as administrator of the United Nations Development Program and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. Throughout his career, Dean Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President's Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation's Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America's Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Environmental Law Institute, and the Blue Planet Prize. Publications include *The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability*, *Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment*; *Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment*; and articles in *Foreign Policy*, *Foreign Affairs*, *Environmental Science and Technology*, *the Columbia Journal World of Business*, and other journals and books.

Professor Silber specializes in the history of the United States between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century, including the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her scholarship focuses mainly on cultural and women's history, but the courses she teaches--on the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the American South--also examine society and politics in these periods. She is the author of numerous publications, including *The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 *(1993), which is an examination of Northerners' changing cultural attitudes towards the South after the Civil War, and *Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War *(2005). She also co-edited* Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War* (1992), *Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Homefront *(1996), and *Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the US Civil War *(2006). She has also consulted on a number of Civil War and women's history video projects and museum exhibits as well as served as Director of Women's Studies at Boston University.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of *Democracy Now!*, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 750 TV and radio stations in North America. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize for developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media. She is also one of the the first recipients, along with Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, of the Park Center for Independent Medias Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. Goodman is the co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers, *Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times *(2008), *Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back* (2006) and *The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them* (2004). Goodman has received the American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Medias Shes Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.